Nicole schreibt...

For the first time in a longer while I was properly jazzed to be going to London again, which was mostly due to the selection of shows on the agenda. Looking back on 2023, while I did see some good stuff, there was just an overabundance of small shows and although I did enjoy most of them and don’t regret seeing them, I just feel this is not the kind of thing to travel greater distances for, they’re more to fill a gap (or see when you live in the nearer orbit). But now I was absolutely ready for some exciting stuff as I headed on my usual route through Belgium and onto the Eurostar (and for once I was the lucky one who had a table with two free seats beside and opposite me). With London hotel prices having gone silly since Covid, I’ve had to look further beyond Zone 1 for something decent and ended up back in Wembley, though this time in the Premier Inn right beside Wembley Park tube station that saved me a long daily slog past the stadium. I dropped my luggage there and chilled for an hour, then by some fortunate coincidence could take the Metropolitan line straight through to the Barbican to first meet a friend, who I’ve been waiting to hug the stuffing out of since 22 July 2022, and then to see the RSC’s adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s beloved anime “My Neighbour Totoro” which has been selling out two longer runs in the big Barbican Theatre by now. Prices were eyewatering (and yes, that plushie really did cost £75, too...) and it wasn’t my favourite Ghibli movie by a stretch, so I had given the first run a miss, but eventually curiosity grew and with nothing new and “big” announced for the West End and me so tired of small productions, decided to bite the bullet and grabbed one of the last tickets for this Thursday for a hefty £100. Luckily it was worth every penny. My initial mistake when seeing the movie was to expect some bigger plot to kick in at any moment which never really happened, so it mostly left me befuddled, wondering what it all had been about. But then I watched it again later, knowing that not much happened and suddenly Miyazaki’s intentions opened up wide for me: A whimsical dive into childhood with two little sisters, 4 year old Mei and 8 year old Satsuki, who move to the countryside with their father to be closer to their ill mother who reconvalences in a hospital nearby. As they explore the house, the garden and finally the forest beyond, they take you back into your own childhood where everything was new, fresh and a wonder, and where reality begins to blend into childish imagination. Represented in this case by Mei’s and later Satsuki’s encounter with Totoro, a magical creature of the forest, based loosely on Japanese kami, spirits of the forest. But after a joyous first half (or first act here) reality intrudes harshly when the girls suddenly fear for their mother’s life after her health takes a turn for the worse. It certainly helps to know the movie, which, much like with Disney stage adaptations, gives you that “I wonder how they did [that]” effect in the theatre and they certainly didn’t disappointed with a whole bunch of puppeteers (themselves rooted in Japanese kabuki) bringing the dustballs to life, the Cat Bus and of course Totoro himself, a towering fluffy giant. The gorgeous lavish stage sets make clear where the money has gone (unlike so many current musicals) and the cast was amazing. It was hard to believe that I saw Mei Mac as a grown up woman in the Fuck Miss Saigon Play last year because she played 4 year old Mei so convincingly, I never saw anything but a little girl on stage. Which was harder with Ami Okumura Jones playing 8 year old Satsuki (let down by an awful wig) and Ka Long Kelvin Chan as awkward country boy Kanta. Composer Joe Hisaishi, who has scored all the big Ghibli movies, wrote some additional songs, sung by Ai Ninomiya in the background, which were lovely but also made the show feel a bit drawn-out at times. Nevertheless I enjoyed every minute of this lovely fanciful trip into childhood with endearing characters and do understand now why this has been selling like hot cakes. There’s talk now of a transfer into the West End but if it does, I hope it won’t lose any of its magic by downscaling from the huge Barbican stage. Before Covid I used to use the free Friday to do something enrichening like visiting a new museum or exhibition or trekking out of London to see another place, but somehow I’ve lost that mojo and haven’t found it again yet. Instead I spent the morning working in my hotel room, then popped round to Camden Lock Market in the afternoon for the first time in a longer while. It was crazy busy and it was hard to deal with the fact that all the stuff from my youth was now on the racks of the vintage shops, so I guess I’m officially vintage now, too. I did have a fairly nice coconut curry though before heading back to the hotel briefly and then to the Old Vic in Southwark. Originally I had a ticket for the Ralph Fiennes "Macbeth", but for an assortment of reasons wasn’t keen on using it and thanks to some marvellous help from a friend (thank you!) I was able to get a refund out of Underbelly and instead went to see the much-discussed new musical "Just For One Day" that tells the story of the legendary Live Aid concert in 1985, since it was after all the period rock music and superstars of this vintage Gen X’er. But instead of making it a tribute show (I can see why they wouldn’t want to do that) they chose to tell the story of singer Bob Geldorf and how he made it happen, creating a dozen average Joe and Jane characters who helped him and who get to sing some of the songs that had been sung at Wembley that day. And this being 2024, it couldn’t resist a modern framing device to add a dose of woke Gen Z preachiness since clearly everything every generation before them did was wrong and misguided. I had hoped for spectacle and rock bangers, but what I got felt like some sort of Gen Z High School Project, with the cast sitting on stadium seats in front of the visible rock band when they weren’t actually in a scene and the scenes just being bits of furniture pushed on stage. Hardly any songs are played in full and there was far too much talk and far too little music for my liking. Nor did I really get much of an 80s vibe from the characters and their looks, although honorable mention must go to the otherwise so pretty Collette Guitart rocking a godawful mullet. Craige Els carries the show as a scruffy looking Bob Geldorf and among the many talents wasted on stage were my beloved Danielle Steers from Bat days, Olly Dobson, last seen rocking the 80s much better in Back to the Future and Julie Atherton, using her comedy chops here to play a rather oddball version of Margaret Thatcher who gets to belt out Elton John’s “I’m still standing”. Part of me wonders if Macbeth had been the better choice after all, but I don’t regret going, especially since I had been able to get a £55 “restricted view” ticket in the front row of the dress circle that wasn’t restricted at all and gave me a perfect view. For that price it was okay, but I wouldn’t pay full price either at the Old Vic or when the inevitable West End transfer comes. But for me it certainly wasn’t the hit many seem to feel it is (and there was an instant standing ovation) and it just left me longing to go home and put a Best Of 80s CD on. Saturday was a short morning (which ultimately wasn’t bad) as the matinee of "Stranger Things" began at 1pm already. I watched every season of the popular Netflix show, a loving homage to the 80s silly horror movies, in which a bunch of Goonies-like kids discover mysterious going-ons in Hawkins, Indiana, befriend an strange girl called Eleven, who escaped from a secret facility and finally discover the horror world of the Upside Down beneath their city. This play, “Stranger Things – The First Shadow” expanded on the backstory that was revealed about Eleven’s origins in Season 4 in the shape of a prequel set in the 50s when the parents of the TV show were teenagers themselves – Joyce (Isabella Pappas a dead ringer for Winona Ryder), dumb jock and future cop Hopper (Oscar Lloyd), Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley) and many more, plus the 50s family of season 4 with Louis McCartney an amazingly creepy young Henry Creel, Patrick Vaill (who played Jud in the “Oklahoma!” revival for just about forever) as young Dr Brenner and one new bigger character, adopted daughter Patty Newby (Ella Karuna Williams), because they shot themselves in the foot by setting the prequel in the much whiter segregated Fifties and London’s obsession with diversity meant they had to shoehorn a black character in. She didn’t really make sense and honestly, for me the play lost a lot of the magic of the TV show by the move from 80s to 50s, losing all the familiarity and happy rediscoveries of my youth. At least he new investigative trio of Joyce, Hopper and Bob was a lot of entertaining fun with some of the humour carrying through to the stage. I can see how they wanted to make it work for a bigger audience that might not know the show, which I think it does, even if non-viewers will be stumped by all the names and don’t know the associations, especially with smaller characters here like Alan Munson (played by Max Harwood, the lead in the movie version of "Everybody's Talking About Jamie"), father of audience favourite Eddie in season 4. The first act is VERY long and the show picks up a lot of pace in the second act after Henry meets Dr Brenner, but the expectation of a big spectacle that was raised in the prologue with a huge ship crashing onto the shore, was never met again. Harry Potter left the audience to gasp and marvel far more often and I really don’t know why they need to start the matinee that early in order “to have time to reset the stage for the evening performance” as they wrote in their mail. It had made me expect a spectacular finale, but it was really more of a damp squib. The great all-around cast does make it worth seeing and it was still a good adventure, but never really matched the TV show for me and made me think that they really need to stop with this milking of TV/movie franchises on the stage. At least I only paid £20 for an excellent Access seat in the second row of the Dress Circle that normally retails for +100, so it was an afternoon well-spent, but I would have hated to pay full price. From here it was on to the Cheese Carousel in Seven Dials to meet my friend (and cheese lover) for the evening and what was the nervously anticipated highlight of the trip: The London production of Hadestown. I don’t need to go into detail of how much the show came to mean to me that I went to New York three times for it and how nervous I was about a repeat of “Bat” when the entire show collapsed around me after the departure of its first leading man and suffering through a totally inadequate replacement. I was relieved when they had announced Irishman Dónal Finn as Orpheus for London, who seemed a decent enough substitute for my Irish-American boy, so I had a minor freak out when on Friday the understudy was announced to be going on for Orpheus – after just one week of previews. Picture my relief when we headed to a pub near the Lyric Theatre stage door before the show and I literally ran into Dónal, joking to my friend that the pub was the obvious place to look for Irishmen (although part of me wondered what he was doing there in full street clothes between matinee and evening). So it was a punch to the stomach to come into the theatre and realize that he had been heading home after the matinee and the understudy, Simon Oskarsson, was on again! So, I’ll take into account that it was Simon’s second performance ever only and he can’t have had many rehearsals yet as nobody would have expected him to go on this early. This considered, he did look like someone ordered a Reeve on Wish and got a cheap Chinese imitation. He looked similar, he even sounded similar, he made the same weird face going after the high notes in the lalalalas… but there was something totally off all the same and he definitely didn’t have the vocal power behind his big songs. That said, he did some fine acting, which was always my boy’s weak point, especially in “If it’s true” and at the end of “Doubt comes in”, so I was able to deal with him as well as was possible and took him into my heart (and I don’t think that Dónal would or could have been much better after what I heard about him from the first week of performances). About the rest... I’ll say Grace Hodgett-Young, last wasted as Sporty Spice in Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard, was a win as Eurydice, playing her more as the tough wanderer, but certainly not with Eva’s (or even Solea’s) vocal power, whereas the others were a bit meh. When Lillias White replaced André de Shields as a female Missus Hermes in New York, it seemed like a fun one-off stunt casting of one of the Broadway’s older legends and it made me happy that the show was hiring people in their 60s and 70s, for who it is so hard to find great parts at their age. But here is no explanation why this should have (much younger) Melanie La Barrie as a female Hermes and she lacked both Lillias’ incredible lungs and her warm motherly presence for Orpheus. Seen as such, she was scene-stealingly great on occasion but I still don’t see why they couldn’t have gone with a male Hermes (and cast an elderly London legend, Clarke Peters springs to mind). Gloria Onitri was at least a black Persephone again after the weird blonde soap-opera Persephone of Betty Who on Broadway, but really needs to work on her amdram-level overacting and Zachary James was for me the biggest let down, coming nowhere near all three excellent Hadeses on Broadway with no noteworthy bass to speak of or showing the heart-rending inner journey of Hades crumbling during Epic III. On a sidenote, the less said about some baffling casting decisions that meant there wasn’t a single female performer who didn’t tick any kind of diversity box, in the cast the better... Sure, all of them will hopefully grow into their parts more and it’s still by a mile the best show out there at the moment, but all the same I left the theatre deeply grateful to my own crazy self and my enablers that I followed my heart’s desire and saw it on Broadway so often. The way it is now, it's certainly not on par with how good it could be with the right people. On the upside, I finally got hold of a proper carnation from the show through a lucky coincidence and I’ll be back in summer to see how it’s developed (and if Dónal will turn up then). For now I am very much looking forward to share a boat with my baby next month and see him in the flesh again...